Embodiments of the invention generally relate to cloud computing, and more particularly, to transferring data between nodes in a distributed computing environment.
Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) delivery model that is expected to grow significantly in at least the next decade. It allows specialized providers in the IT industry to offer their customers various types of services, ranging from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), which offers remote access to computing resources such as virtual machines (VMs), and storage, to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which offers fully managed software functionality. These types of services allow labor, hardware, software and system management costs to be shared; they reduce overall costs and make such services more affordable for both individual and enterprise consumers. Cloud computing also allows a new generation of IT services to develop, which can be more easily integrated and delivered. More specifically, it significantly builds on the potential for both virtualization technology and broad scale automation to minimize delivery costs while maintaining a high quality of service.
Large cloud computing service providers, and IaaS providers in particular, tend to deliver their services out of multiple worldwide datacenters. Consequently, substantial collections of data must be made available on more than one datacenter, and therefore may need to be transferred between datacenters across the cloud architecture.
Examples of data that may require transferring between datacenters include, without limitation: virtual machine (VM) images; packages; and archives.